In Del Rio, California, 13-year-old Cody Alicea rides with an American flag on the back of his bike. He does this, he says, to be patriotic and to honor veterans, like his grandfather. He’s been flying the flag on his bike for two months, but at the beginning of the week of Veteran’s Day was told by a school official at Denair Middle School that some students had been complaining about the flag and it was no longer allowed on school property. Continue reading
school administrators
Texas Cheerleading Ethics: Cheer Your Rapist!
In the current issue of Sports Illustrated, Selena Roberts relates the tale of an ethical outrage, one that will makes your heart sink at the realization that there is so much incompetence, lack of common sense, cruelty and irresponsibility in the world…and that so much of it resides in high school administration.
A Silsbee (Texas) High School cheerleader, identified in the story only as “H.S.”, had told police that she had been cornered in a room by three school athletes during a party, and sexually assaulted. Her screams were heard by others at the party, and charges were filed. Roberts writes, “In a town whose population is 7,341 and whose high school football stadium seats 7,000…the alleged assault prompted two questions: How would it affect the girl? And how would it affect the team?” Continue reading
Students Learn Why Competence Is An Ethical Duty, The Hard Way: The Case of the Illiterate Principal
Last month, Principal Andrew Buck of the Middle School for Art and Philosophy in Brooklyn responded to complaints about the school’s chronic shortage of textbooks by telling eachers and students that textbooks were over-rated. In an e-mail to teachers containing ungrammatical sentences, incorrect punctuation, misspellings and incoherent statements, Buck told his employees that textbooks weren’t essential to the learning process, and noted that some students wouldn’t be able to read the books anyway.
A representative sample from the letter, which you can read in more detail here (it requires registering for Google Docs): Continue reading
Let Us Not Forget Itawamba County, Miss.
I am haunted second thoughts about awarding Obion County the title of Unethical Community of the Year.
For one thing, it is only October, and there is a lot of time for another unethical community or more to reveal its lack of decency to the nation and the world (and then to have Keith Olbermann declare that it represents the ideal for Tea Partiers). Still, I am having a hard time imagining anything worse for an American community than directing its fire department to let a human being’s home burn down, whether or not the homeowner has three dogs and a cat (as Mr. Cranick did, and I emphasize did), because that human being didn’t pay a $75 fee.
The real reason I am having doubts, however, is the horrible tale that came to light this past spring. Continue reading
Nettleton Middle School, Embracing Racism in 2010
Help me out here: which category does this story fall under:
- School administrator incompetence?
- Warped community ethical standards?
- Racial quotas run amuck?
- Evidence of human devolution?
- Proof that time travel is real?
I’m not sure. I do know that when a memo like this one is issued by a school principal, indicating that class officers for the sixth, seventh and eighth grades are restricted by race, there had better be a lot of firing going on, really soon, up and down the entire school system and maybe the town government as well, because the people in charge must not be trusted for one more second to have anything to do with educating American children. Continue reading
Ethics Dunce: Evan S. Cohen
The New York Times has a provocative examination of the ways cyber-bullying and abusive social networking sites and posts are challenging schools and courts. It also exposes a particularly cruel Ethics Dunce, Evan S. Cohen.
In 2008, Cohen’s daughter videotaped her friends as they mocked and made vicious comments, some of them sexual about another eighth-grade girl. Then Cohen’s daughter posted the video on YouTube, traumatizing its victim. The school was alerted by the devastated girl’s parents, and then suspended Cohen’s daughter for two days.
Daddy, however, is an attorney, and he knows overstepping authority when he sees it. He sued the school district, arguing that the school couldn’t reach into his daughter’s off-campus activities and punish her for them. Of course, he was right, and won the lawsuit. He also won $107,150.80 in costs and lawyer fees. Continue reading
Law School and High School Credential Corruption
In many high schools around the country, as many as fifty graduating seniors were designated “valedictorians,” because the traditional honor for the top academic performer is a coveted credential, and the schools wanted as many students as possible to have the benefit of it. On their future resumes, will these students footnote “valedictorian” to let potential employers know that it doesn’t mean they were #1 in their class? Of course not. Their schools have given them a license to inflate their qualifications and achievements. Until every school clones its valedictorians, the credential now is inherently deceptive, and it is the high school administrators, not the students, who are doing the deceiving.
Ah, but “you ain’t seen nothin’ yet!” The New York Times reported that at least ten law schools, S.M.U., New York University, Georgetown, and Tulane among them, have deliberately altered their grading curves—-some retroactively—in order to make their graduates artificially look better to employers. Continue reading
Abuse of Power in the Schools, Part 2: “Beat the Jew”
Seven seniors at a high school at a La Quinta, California high school have been suspended for three to five days, causing some of them to miss graduation, because they participated in a role-playing game, organized on Facebook, after school during their own personal time. The school administrators found the game objectionable, which you will be able to understand. But nobody was hurt, and no laws were broken.
That is all we really need to know. That the seniors were disciplined by the school for an activity completely unrelated to school is a pure abuse of power. This is an outrageous extension of school and government authority into the private lives of the students involved. It should not matter what the game was…not to the school. The governments of La Quinta, California and the United States couldn’t outlaw the game, nor could they forbid citizens to play it, not could they punish citizens that did.
Now, because you may be curious, here’s a description of the game. Continue reading
Abuse of Power in the Schools, Part 1: Pimping the Kids
Blogger-mom Laura Wellington is making the talk show rounds after a post last month on her blog aroused interest and commentary from various newspapers. In the post, she indignantly described a fundraising drive by her child’s school that understandably raised her ire:
“…the letter [my daughter] handed me stated my daughter was to accomplish chores around the house with the goal of being paid by me for those chores the sum of $20. She would then have to hand the full $20 over to the school to make up for the shortfall in their overall budget which, ultimately, disallowed the kids to go on yet another class trip. Participation was mandatory according to what my daughter told me and the letter seemingly conveyed (however, on a later phone call, my daughter’s teacher altered the word “mandatory” to be “suggested” despite all evidence to the contrary)…”
Wellington’s complaint is that schools need to exercise fiscal responsibility, and she is joining a rising chorus of protest among parents across the country who feel that their tax dollars should not have to be supplemented with constant arm-twisting from schools urging them to buy and sell over-priced cookies or provide additional contributions. This is a fiscal policy issue; the ethical issue should be less controversial. When did schools get the authority to dictate what children do outside school? How do they justify requiring unpaid labor for the school’s benefit? Continue reading
Next: Paramilitary “Jolly Rancher” Raids?
“No tolerance policy” is clearly a misnomer: what it appears to mean in practice is “self-designed trap to expose the incompetence and lack of basic fairness of school personnel. According to that definition, “no tolerance” polices are working extremely well.
For example, an Orchard, Texas third-grader at Brazos Elementary was given a week’s detention for first-degree possession a Jolly Rancher. The school’s principal and superintendent said they were simply complying with a state law that limits junk food in schools. The miscreant, Leighann Adair, 10, was eating lunch when a teacher saw the candy and confiscated it. Her punishment is that she must be separated from other students during lunch and recess for the rest of the week. Continue reading
Ethics Alarms 